Xu Jilin, "Wang Yuanhua"

Xu Jilin, “’I am a Child of the Nineteenth Century:’ The Last Twenty Years of Wang Yuanhua’s Life”

许纪霖, “‘我是十九世纪之子’ —王元化的最后二十年,” originally published in 读书, 2008:8, currently available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/20738.html.
 
N.B.  This is a partial translation.  The full text is available for purchase as part of the volume Voices from the Chinese Century:  Public Intellectual Debate in Contemporary China, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019).

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
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Introduction
 
Wang Yuanhua 王元化 (1920-2008) is little known in the West, even if he is a hero to many Chinese liberals.  This is because Wang, like his better known counterpart Li Shenzhi 李慎之, was deeply steeped in traditional Chinese culture, joined and loyally served the Communist Party for decades, and in later life developed an independent, critical, “liberal” voice grounded in humanism. 
 
Wang joined the Communist Party in 1938 and worked in the realms of propaganda, thought, art and culture.  After the revolution, he served in the Shanghai Writers Association and did editorial work for different newspapers and magazines.  He was caught up in a major purge in 1955 against Hu Feng 胡风,[3] who had dared to argue that Mao Zedong’s theories of art and literature were too narrow and repressive.  Wang was incarcerated and interrogated for some time, and was not finally rehabilitated until 1981, which meant that he had 16 years to reflect on his thought and experiences.  Once rehabilitated, he published a series of books—often composed of notes, commentaries, and brief essays—that were immensely influential among Chinese intellectuals because of Wang’s willingness to use his personal experience to question received wisdom.
 
While Liu Qing, in his essay on this site, reflects on the fate of Chinese liberalism from a theoretical perspective, Xu Jilin uses Wang’s experience and reflections to ground Chinese liberalism in the soil of modern Chinese history.  Wang, like Li Shenzhi and others, came to his “liberal” stance after considerable personal pain and suffering, which had brought him to reflect deeply on his prior ideological beliefs and commitments.  Furthermore, as Wang questioned his earlier commitment to revolution, his thoughts turned more to the humanism of traditional Chinese civilization than to the classics of Western liberalism.  This is the point of Wang’s embrace of Du Yaquan杜亞泉, a figure of ridicule during the iconoclastic May Fourth Period because he dared to suggest moderate solutions that found a place for the past and the present, Chinese and foreign.  Such moderation was important for Wang and remains so for Xu, who often argues that Chinese scholars must set aside petty ideological differences in the search for a consensus that can help to create the basic values Chinese society currently lacks.  In the end, Wang Yuanhua represents a personality type, a commitment to independent thinking and personal integrity that to Xu Jilin serves as a Chinese “contribution,” drawing on the moral stance of the traditional Chinese scholar-official, to liberal “theory.”
 
Translation
 
On May 9, 2008, at 11:40 p.m., in a room at Shanghai’s Ruijin Hospital, Wang Yuanhua 王元化quietly departed this earth.  Three days later the Sichuan earthquake occurred, and throughout China tears were shed for those killed and injured.  Wang had struggled with his own suffering in his old age, and being spared the horrible bad news that followed his death might be seen as the fortunate side of his own misfortune.  At the funeral ceremony, Wang lay peacefully among the fresh flowers, his expression as calm as ever; I could hardly believe that he was gone for good.  A sadness overcome me that I could not control. 
 
When I met Wang, he was already elderly, without much time left.  The twenty years around the turn of the century were difficult times.  I was lucky enough to witness the last years of Wang’s life from a close vantage point.  While Wang was alive, he would discuss affairs of state or talk about the Way in a manner that seemed completely ordinary.  But after his death, as his familiar silhouette slipped over the horizon, I suddenly felt a huge lump in my throat, a hole that could never be filled.  The loss was not just personal, but belonged to all of Chinese culture.
 
During this period of mourning, I reread Wang’s writings, with the idea of working my scattered memories into a larger canvas that might convey Wang’s thought, spirit and frame of mind in his later years.
 
In death, Wang’s body was draped in the flag of the Chinese Communist Party, with its hammer and sickle.  He entered the party at the age of 18, in 1938, a year marked by constant warfare, especially in bloody, occupied Shanghai, where Wang was living.  Like Li Shenzhi, Wang joined the revolution in the wake of the December 9 [1935] movement, on fire to save the country.  Like Li, Wang was an “old-style Communist Party member.”  “Old style” was what Li Shenzhi called himself.  New-style Communist Party members join the party for material gain; the Party is a tool in their efforts to climb the hierarchy and make money.  Old-style Communist Party members poured the loves and hatreds of a lifetime into the Party, and their identification with the Party, their idealism—all of this is hard for later generations to grasp.